"Oh? What implication would that be?" he asked, with such affected innocence that he was nearly tempted to bat his eyelashes at her. He was tempted to take both of the dances, because even as agitated as she was he didn't think she would wrestle up the courage to stop him. The trouble with that was that he almost certainly wouldn't remember to come back for both of them — he might not even remember to find her for one of them, honestly. Standing a girl up for a dance was hardly the worst thing he could be accused of, but standing a girl up for two dances in the same night was egregious enough that even Porphyria, who did not care a whit for society's rules, might take notice of how rude he had been. He was having fun playing around with Miss Malfoy, but he didn't care enough about the game to end up on the receiving end of... whatever Porphyria would do when she was agitated. Not lecture. Drop a spider down the back of his pajamas while he slept? Put an unflattering caricature of him into one of her poems?

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